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Occam's Razor

Volume 8 (2018) Article 2

2018 Against the Psychoanalytic Unconscious: Deleuze, Guattari, and Desire as a Heuristic for Self- Regulating Chris Coles Western Washington University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Coles, Chris (2018) "Against the Psychoanalytic Unconscious: Deleuze, Guattari, and Desire as a Heuristic for Self-Regulating Biopolitics," Occam's Razor: Vol. 8 , Article 2. Available at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/orwwu/vol8/iss1/2

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DELEUZE, CUATTARI, AND DESIRE AS A HEURISTIC FOR SELF-REGULATING BIOPOLITICS

By Chris Coles

975 marked the release of Michel ’s of the sovereign’s subjects^’^. Thus, biopolitics 1 ^'': The Birth of the Prison^' provides the regulatory framework for which the which his preceding lectures would later term 'bio- execution of power (that Foucault describes in politics\ Both "Discipline and Punish” and "The Birth "Discipline and Punish”) not only arises, but also of Biopolitics” represent some of the most important, the reason for which it exists in the first place. impactful, and informative theories on the way in Biopolitics works not only as a description of the which surveillance functions; consequently, how its power works to materially produce the conditions but also the reason for which those apparatuses for oppression. are used. In "Discipline and Punish^” Foucault utilizes gene­ While Foucault’s analysis is thorough in the alogical analysis to trace the historical strands that material examination of the existence and func­ come together in forming of disciplinary society; tion of biopolitics, it lacks a desire-focused ex­ what Foucault articulates typifies the power for­ planation for the reason in which biopolitics is mation and deployment of the contemporary sov- so effective at not only sustaining power, but also ereignh Foucault expands on this theory through in the regulation of populations'^. This lack of de­ the development of 'biopolitics\ He defines this as sire-centered analysis has led some to interpret the sovereign’s use of power through politics. This and mobilize Foucauldian biopolitics in such a is done in order to manipulate and control the lives

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HEURISTIC I involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by way that reinforces the Lacanian psy­ experimental and especially trial-and- choanalytic tradition; the process has error methods forwarded an understanding of biopol­ itics that actually reinforces biopolitical :

control. As both a resistance to this the development of techniques for having fundamentally violent trend and appli­ power over other bodies cation of Foucault’s analysis to the vio­ lence of the neoliberal world, I propose that the work of and ferently. Forwarding and reframing (to Felix Guattari (specifically their elabo­ his credit) Freud, Lacan centers desire ration on desire and ^desiring-machines,^) around an individual’s unconscious and as the best heuristic for understanding specifically the unconscious contain­ the way in which biopower functions. ment of unknowable 'signifiers^. In­ ’s first writ­ deed, to Lacan, the unconscious governs ten- ""Anti-Oedipus: Cap­ the expression of a subjects desire and italism and Schizophrenia Volume i” actions; dually, the unconscious is un­ addresses the way in which Lacanian able to be fully understood^. - and psychoanalysis To clarify, what Lacan articulates writ large - engenders the conditions is that there are latent, naturalistic for the capitalist control and manipula­ 'signifiers\ When interfaced with so­ tion of bodies and subjectivities^. Thus, cial realities (which correspond to said before diving into Deleuze and Guat­ ^signifiers), it produces a specific kind tari’s (DnG) of desire and how of desiring-response. Lacan then uses it implicates biopolitics, it’s critical to Freud’s Oedipus Complex to re-con- understand the Lacanian psychoanaly­ ceptualize the want to kill the father as sis that provided the structure for which the fundamental '‘castration! or '‘loss that they were writing against. While both is at the heart of every ’s psycho­ Lacan and DnG’s critical projects center logical development^. This loss provides the importance of desire, they go about the framework for which unconscious constructing desire - and its interaction signifiers interface with the world. Due with subjects and society - radically dif- to the strictly partial knowability of the unconscious, there will always be a

Foucault defines [biopolitics] as the sovereign’s use of power through politics. This is done in order to manipulate and control the lives of the sovereign’s subjects.

https://cedar.wwu.edu/orwwu/vol8/iss1/2 2 Coles: Against the Psychoanalytic Unconscious: Deleuze, Guattari, and De

'lack' in what is expressed and what is understood. This 'lack' comes to express the fundamental lynch pin of Lacanian desire: due to the inability of subjects throughout the social body” through its to fully understand the other, desire ability to get subjects to self-regulate can only be represented and understood themselves^. The question of self-regu­ through the individuals unconscious. lation opens the door for Lacanian psy­ Despite the fact that Foucault would choanalysis to describe the conditions likely object to his work being explained for which that self-regulation occurs; through a frame of Lacanian psycho­ generally, this is through some appeal analysis, he lacks an articulation of how to the voyeuristic unconscious. Since biopolitics intersects with a conception self-regulation centers on Foucault’s of desire and subjectivity. Due to this, discussion of power, this interpretation and the near omnipresence of Lacan in is able to circuit the entirety of biopol­ the western academy, Foucault’s con­ itics through Lacanian psychoanalysis. ception of biopolitics leaves itself very Deleuze and Guattari focus on La­ open to the possibility of being ex­ canian psychoanalysis and its explana­ plained through Lacan. A conception tion of power as the oppositional form of biopolitics understood through La­ which they develop their concept of de­ canian psychoanalysis would ground the sire. Antithetical to Lacan’s individualist functioning of biopower in its appeal to concept of desire, Deleuze and Guattari individual unconscious signifiers; also, articulate that desire is inherently a col­ communicating that sovereign control lective and horizontal function; hence, stems from its ability to generate the the connection of one subject to another possibility for individuals to shift their creates a 'desiring-machine. Addition­ psychological anxiety (or lack thereof) ally, the function produces desire both onto the other. from that connection and the connec­ The possibility for the aforemen­ tions broader position in the structures tioned Lacanian interpretation of bio­ of society^®. politics seems to be most applicable in To Deleuze and Guattari, desire is Foucault’s usage of Bentham’s 'Panopti­ necessarily a collective production, in con as a heuristic for understanding one which the unconscious is a theater that structuralized instance of biopolitics. produces and internalizes the desire One of Foucault’s arguments as to why that is produced by the relationships the panoptic society is so powerful in its in which subjects engage - also, the regulation of populations is due to the structures of power that those subjects fact that the panoptic is able to “spread encounter^^’^^. Desire implicates subjec­ tivity; however, subjects are not static.

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contained, individuals. Instead, subjects are con­ stantly open and changing to the desire that is constantly produced in ; Deleuze and Guattari term this 'becoming^^. Therefore, desire HEGEMONY is not a lack that can never be understood (termi- Leadership or dominance, especially by one nalizing in only the individual); instead, desire is country or social group over others a flow that is constantly moving, connecting, and growing in intensity in such a way that produc­ es subjects as 'becoming instead of individuah"^. 'Becoming consequently produces subject-subject relationships and structural arrangements that Deleuzoguattarian desire would conceptualize the are horizontal. These arrangements are based on self-regulation endemic to biopolitics as not a ques­ affective connections and open to the flowing of tion of the voyeuristic unconscious; instead, it is the desire in a necessarily anti-hierarchal way; these sovereign’s ability to circuit desire as only intelligible arrangements being called 'assemblages^^. if it is fundamentally biopolitical. Subjects’ expres­ Deleuze and Guattari articulate that while sion of self-regulating biopolitics is not a question the function of desire (aforementioned) being of their unconscious signifiers. Hegemonic power’s such, desire is not produced in a neutral way. ability to control the production of desire in such Rather, the very nature (horizontal and collec­ a way that subjects are forced to be biopolitical and tive) of desire means that desire is able to be desirous of biopolitics. This is compounded with the controlled, or 'circuited by structures of power. way in which allows for the produc­ This operates through structures of power utiliz­ tion of limited 'becoming ^ particularly white 'becom­ ing their material power to forward a dominant ing . This extends to capital investment and catego­ conception of desire; this elevates the only flow rization of bodies, revealing how Deleuzoguattarian of desire that is considered legitimate to express. theory is important in understanding the meta level Structures of power thus utilize their hegemonic power of biopolitics. Also, the ways in which other power to force 'becoming into statized individu­ structures of power, like neoliberalism, utilize bio­ als^^. Inverting assemblages into hierarchical re­ politics to cement and exercise their power^^. lations produce desire in such a way that only Indeed, Deleuze, Guattari’s, and Lacan’s con­ makes sense in so far as its relation to that struc­ cepts of desire are radically different. Lacanian ture of power. For example, white construction psychoanalysis is individualist, naturalistic, and of people of color is characterized as inherently undesirable and fundamentally anti-human; this reveals the way in which structures of oppression hijack subjects desire to reinforce the conditions DELEUZOGUATTARIAN of their power. Also, how they frame desire which relating to, or characteristic of, the works of is recognized by said system as ‘deviant’. Thus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

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a strictly static and enclosed individuaP^. Specif­ hierarchical, while Deleuzoguattarian desire is the ically, by framing desire and consequent subject exact opposite of that; Deleuze and Guattari also as starting and ending with the biologic body, it problematize Lacanian psychoanalysis as an explic­ characterizes the subject as hierarchical - col­ it function of oppression^^. Deleuze and Guattari lapsing the possibility for the flow of desire. This problematize the individualistic naturalism inherent causes bodies to be defined strictly on the basis in the Lacanian unconscious as a refusal to engage of their worth in relation to structures of power with the ways that structures of power infiltrate (for example, their productivity to the capitalist the subject’s unconscious. To demonstrate this fact, project; hence, specific bodies to be based Deleuze excavates the traditional Freudian case of on their defined worth to neoliberal markets)^^'^^. Schreber, in which during a session of psychoanal­ In summary, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not only ysis Schreber expresses explicitly racist discourse. oppressive in and of itself, but also makes the­ However, the psychoanalyst ignores this and latch­ orizing biopolitics under a Lacanian framework es onto Schreber’s utterance of a specific name as a near impossibility. This is because the systems an indication of their Oedipus^^. This, to Deleuze, (, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, highlights the individualist focus of Lacanian psy­ anti-blackness, et cetera) that the Lacanian un­ choanalysis, forcing the only concern onto ^signifi- conscious reinforces all utilize biopolitics as an ers . This leads to ignoring structures of power like exercise of their oppression and legitimacy. anti-blackness and settler colonialism. In short, the Foucault theorized biopolitics as a tool to process allows them to re-naturalize themselves^h shed light on the material way in which the sov­ Not only does the Lacanian unconscious tacitly ereign is able to utilize and manipulate its power reinforce structures of power through obscuration, to justify itself and create the conditions for op­ but also directly in its construction of subjectivity as pression. It was done in the service of creating more effective, nuanced, and liberating resistance movements. This provides invaluable tools to the We lose that revolutionary power dismantling of the intertwined nature of contem­ when we utilize a framework porary surveillance. We lose that revolutionary that replicates biopolitics and power when we utilize a framework that repli­ subsequently turns our coalitions of cates biopolitics and subsequently turns our co­ resistance into matrices of oppression. alitions of resistance into matrices of oppression. Deleuzoguattarian desire is relevant through its ability to provide the most material explana­ tion of biopolitics. Also, it has an ability to fun­ damentally resist one of the foundational ways that biopolitics expresses itself. In contrast, La­ canian psychoanalysis should be rejected on the grounds that its foundational replication of some of the central tenants of neoliberalism. Addition­ ally, it becomes impossible to utilize the analysis of biopolitics to dismantle biopower when the

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very framework you are utilizing replicates the con­ ditions of biopower. Undoubtedly, the process of living and dying within the assemblages of violence (which scar the contemporary world) mark the necessity for revo­ lutionary action. The fact that this action needs to begin with a conception of desire does not re-justify (hence, re-deploy) those structures of oppression. Indeed, structures that revolution is necessarily an­ tagonistic against. This is due to the fact that sys­ tems of power, like capitalism, utilize desire as one of the primary staging grounds for its deployment of violence. Indeed, to quote Guattari: “to reinforce its social terror...the capitalist army of occupation strives, through an ever more refined system of ag­ gression, provocation, and blackmail, to repress, to exclude, and to neutralize all those practices of de­ sire which do not reproduce the established form of domination”^^. This statement exemplifies that to truly engage in revolutionary action - which dis­ mantles systems of genocide and mass death - liber­ ation must “move beyond the limits of our person,’ that we overturn the notion of the ‘individual...’ in order to travel the boundaryless territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires”^^. This necessity of revolutionary action is provided by Fou­ cault’s biopolitics, but becomes impossible to utilize if circuited through the fundamentally violent frame of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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